Texas Fights For Us All Against Pro-Islamic Textbooks

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.” – Christopher Hurley

That famous quote by Hurley is exactly what many on the Texas school board are afraid of. Will our young people get “a whole new life” that ignores the dangers of Radical Islam?

The recent uptick in the culture war over the Islamization of America has led some teachers and school boards to look much more closely at what we are teaching about Islam.

A few weeks ago, we at NewsReal were one of the first to break the story on New York high school exams promoting Islam and tearing down the history of Christianity. Some folks in Texas have taken a look at their own history textbooks and have seen the same problem. Now the Texas Board of Education is set to vote Friday on a resolution to get rid of textbooks that whitewash Islam’s history while attacking the spread of Christianity. The board is in a three day meeting to determine if current history books are filled with
“pro-Islamic, anti-Christian half-truths and selective disinformation.”

In the world of textbooks, when Texas makes a decision it affects everyone. The state’s rules set the precedent for their 4.7 millions students, and their book choices are
usually adopted by many other states. Those opposing the conservatives
on the board understand what’s at stake.

Publishers take this kind of thing seriously and will do everything in their power — rewrite and revise — to make sure their book doesn’t become a hot button point of
contention. Publishers have Texas under the microscope. Dan Quinn, a
spokesman Left-leaning, Austin-based Texas Freedom Network

The Texas Board of Education has ten Republicans and five Democrats on it. One of the more conservative board members has come up with a six-page resolution that resolves to:

reject future prejudicial Social Studies submissions that continue to offend Texas law with respect to treatment of the world’s major religious groups by significant inequalities of coverage space-wise and/or by demonizing or lionizing one or more of
them over others.

The resolution has detailed examples from multiple Social Studies books showing a high number of problems. The books give far more attention to Islam than Christianity. The authors speak of Islamic history in glowing terms while denouncing the spread of Christianity. And much of the
terrors of Islamization and Jihad are whitewashed or not given any mention in the textbooks.

In the book, World History: Patterns of Interaction, the authors detail terrors of Christians in a 1099 Crusade of Jerusalem “while censoring Muslims’ massacres of Christians there in 1244 and at Antioch in 1268″ according to the resolution. In another book students can read about how
medieval Christianity promoted sexism, massacred non-believers, and how
the Church “laid the foundations to anti-Semitism.” The book goes on to
mention Tamerlane Muslims without revealing that they slaughtered around 200,000 people in Baghdad and Delhi around the year 1400.

Groups on the Left like the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) have gone on a full assault against the resolution. They have even come out with a counter to the claims of the resolution. The irony is that much of their counter furthers the resolution’s argument. The TFN offers examples of
the textbooks mentioning negative Islamic history, but practically most of their examples reveal that the text makes excuses for Islam (or ignores Islam’s role) when reporting criticisms of its past. There were no such excuses for Christianity.

The TFN report quotes the books mentioning what atrocities some Muslims did without focusing on their religion. Instead of saying Muslims killed 100,000 Hindus in Delhi, the text simply says Timur Lenk did it. Yet when armies were crushed by a European ruler – it was Christian
Crusaders doing the killing.

How about this quote the TFN offers to defend the books? “Like rulers elsewhere at this time, many Muslim rulers in India were intolerant of other faiths.” Is that your best
example of equal treatment? Christian crusaders massacred people in
cold blood, but Muslim rulers were simply “intolerant” like “rulers
elsewhere at this time.” Thanks TFN, you really made your case well.

Hopefully the Texas Board of Education will lead the way and vote to get rid of such anti-Christian and pro-Islamic bias in Social Studies books. They can set a great example
for the rest of our country. The minds of tomorrow’s leaders deserve
the truth and not blind promotion of a whitewashed history of Islam. If you want to debate how much Islam has changed over the centuries, fine. But do not change the past to fit your political interests.

Paul Cooper is a husband and father above all else. With a wife and 2 daughters he could use a dog, but sadly he only owns a cat – a female cat no less. Paulis also a pastor, blogger, and business owner.